Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/348

332 elements, but, however composite it may turn out to be, it will always continue the mainspring of human action, and the primary element with which education will have to deal. Everything centers in the emotional life. To stunt and cripple and repress that is to make impossible a full life in other directions. Kill it, and you have the dead souls of our social world. In childhood, the emotional life is strong. And here, I think, and not in Florida, is to be found the fountain of perpetual youth. We should never grow old if in our hearts we could keep always the full flood of feeling. It is the drying up of this part of our natures that makes possible the dreadful indifference and paralysis of old age. And we want this prodigality of feeling because it will lead to action, and we want action because it will bring sensation, and we want sensations because they are the material of thought. Manual training builds its methods upon this psychology. It looks first and last and always to the motive power, to the emotions and desires. If these are strong, if the child is alert and full-blooded and interested, at once may be undertaken the more specific work of supplying a rich and suitable environment, to keep alive this emotional life, to strengthen it and to direct it to helpful and noble ends. Well-born children possess this full emotional life. But with apathetic children it must be aroused. The little childish heart must be set on fire with new desires and longings, and these made so strong that they simply must be satisfied. This is a difficult task, and one with which the older schemes of education do not pretend to cope, for they do not realize that it is an essential part of their work. Indeed, for the most part they address themselves to the very contrary proceeding, the repression of such childish desires as already exist and are found not to be convenient.

The method by which manual training arouses and fosters a many-sided interest and stimulates desire is by giving children something to do, and by allowing such a free play of choice and individuality both in the something and in the doing that at the very first possible moment the activity shall be self-directed. When this point is once gained, the work of education has begun. Where the will is weak, as in the case of poor, anæmic children, the interest may soon flag, may indeed sputter and go quite out. And all this is very discouraging. But the interest must simply be aroused and stimulated afresh. Never, however great the seeming extremity, must the interest and desire of the teacher be made to do duty for that of the child, for, the moment this occurs, the work of education ceases, and a meaningless, unpsychological process takes its place.

It is not much learning that makes us mad, but much interference.

In young children, the great impulse is to play, and it was this